Gigabyte P55W v5
Power and price in balance
PRICE $ 2099 www.gigabyte.com.au
This is the fifth version of the P55W from Gigabyte, so they’ve obviously had some time to get things sorted. It’s the cheapest laptop in the roundup, but don’t let that fool you – thanks to some savvy software installation, this actually manages to beat out some of the competition.
At this price point, the fully plastic enclosure is forgivable, and Gigabyte has ensured it’s thick enough to handle a bit of a beating. The 15.6-inch screen is the smallest of the three here, but is just big enough to deliver an immersive gaming experience. The screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 is fine for these dimensions, with pixel structure nearly invisible. Gigabyte claims it has a 178 degree viewing angle, the crucial spec that signifies this is an IPS panel. It’s no wonder that colour and contrast look pretty damn solid, yet there’s very little of the motion blurring that these panels can suffer from.
Tipping the scales at 2.5kg, the P55W v5 feels heavier than it really is, but that’s probably because I’ve used so many sub-1kg ultrabooks of late. By gaming laptop standards, this is actually pretty damn light. A decent range of I/O ports line the exterior, including a DVD drive. Three USB 3.0 Type A, one USB 3.1 Type C, one HDMI 2.0, one D-Sub, one RJ-45, as well as the usual mic-in/ headphone out ports are all included, along with an SD Card reader. Wireless network is of the latest 802.11ac standard.
Considering it’s just over two grand, the internals are extremely impressive. Intel’s Core i7-6700HQ seems to be the flavour of the month when it comes to gaming laptops, and it feeds off 8GB of DDR4 2133MHz memory. A single 128GB M.2 SSD is home to the OS, but only 103GB is usable. Another 1TB of mechanical storage is included for your game collection, but I’d recommend upgrading the SSD to the 256GB option. Rounding out the hardware is NVIDIA’s excellent GTX 970M GPU, which performs on par with a desktop GTX 960.
As you can see from the benchmarks, this laptop delivered playable performance across all of our games. Don’t worry too much about the low min FPS rate in Mordor, as it appears to be a glitch at the start of the benchmark as it loads in – performance is silky smooth thereafter. To my delight, the P55W v5 managed to perform so well while remaining extremely quiet, measuring just 45dB on the sound meter. It even
Rounding out the hardware is NVIDIA’s excellent GTX 970M GPU, which performs on par with a desktop GTX 960
outperformed the more expensive MSI, likely due to the lack of bloatware that MSI loves to load onto its gaming laptops.
It might have taken five iterations, but Gigabyte has delivered an excellent gaming laptop targeted at the more affordable end of the market in this machine. It’s well built, with an excellent display and powerful specs, giving it the chops to handle today’s titles. Best of all, like all of the laptops here, it seems Gigabyte has finally cured the issue of annoying fan noise, making this a pleasure to use.